How a comedian made free speech possible

Image credit- flickr.com/djwudi

What does Rock ‘n’ Roll have in common with Stand up Comedy? Not Much. Probably nothing at all.

But this is a tribute to a man who had the balls to take on the system and say what he wanted, whenever he wanted, the way he wanted. A man who inspired a generation, a generation of rockers included, to say what was on their minds without holding back.

George Carlin’s “Seven Dirty Words” changed the way entertainers expressed themselves and related to their audience. It forced a society, drawn back to conservatism after the upheavals of the 60’s, to renew its respect for the values of free speech that it had committed to protect.

Carlin was an opinionated man. Very opinionated. The topics that were covered during his routines were unheard of at the time for comedians to touch. These included war, abortion and a vast range of topics in the sphere of politics. His material was as much social critique as stand-up comedy, the stuff that has inspired everyone from Bill Maher to Jon Stewart. Carlin had a famously low opinion of politics and religion, once saying “I’m completely in favor of the separation of Church and State. My idea is that these two institutions screw us up enough on their own, so both of them together is certain death.” Probably the only other things he ridiculed as much were man’s constant thirst for war, usually because of the before mentioned two factors,  and of course the English language calling it a “tool for concealing the truth.”

It was during one of his famous routines on the English language in the record Class Clown that he came up with the “dirty seven”, as he put it “the heavy seven. ….. The ones that’ll infect your soul, curve your spine and keep the country from winning the war.” Of course he was arrested. The end-game of the law suits that resulted in the years to come was that the U.S Supreme Court upheld the FCC’s right to censor “obscene speech” at selected times of the day. While one could reasonably ague that Carlin’s action had inadvertently helped “constitutionalize” censorship, another view is to say that this created a safe-haven for speech when “the adult hours” were on, that is after 10pm. In other words during these times the public airwaves were to be out of reach for the FCC, as far as speech was concerned.

Of course such things as political dissent were never an issue in the U.S, but Carlin brought with him a raging fire on stage. His material was as intelligent as it was funny. At the beginning of his career Carlin was just another ordinary funny man, what changed his mind and attitude was the rise of counter-culture in the 1960’s.  He absorbed the growing dissent around him and came out with new material and a style that was as outlandish to comedy as the Sex-Pistols were to the Queen’s England. He also drastically changed the look of the “comedy-guy”; his metamorphism from the neatly dressed man in a suit to the long haired bearded guy in old jeans inspired many others to wriggle out of the convention. What was unique was that there was a sense of energy on stage in his style. A style he further dramatized in the late 80’s; inspired by the likes of Bill Hicks he did a lot more shouting and jumping, though without the “preaching” that Hicks incorporated into comedy. Therein lay the beauty of Carlin. He didn’t have an agenda. He said it as he saw it.

The effect that Carlin had on mainstream culture was more subtle. It was never immediate. He was never really mainstream the way someone like Carson was, though he was the first to host Saturday Night Live. His material didn’t appeal to the suburban middle-aged middle classes straightaway, it took some time. His influence was to make the public sphere open-up in ways it had ever been before. A change that has given artistes from Green Day to Metallica the freedom that the artiste of the 60’s and 70’s never possessed. It has enabled the lyricist to delve into issues and use the English language in a way that was never possible before Carlin. This is not to say that the issue of censorship has disappeared, but it has mostly been avoided with more pragmatic ways, from the side of the artiste itself, without having to sacrifice on the side of content and quality.

When Cable TV came along later on, without the restrictions of censorship that was associated as in the case of network TV, Carlin said it was “liberating”. Yeah free speech is.

“I think it’s the duty of the comedian to find out where the line is drawn and cross it deliberately.” – George Denis Patrick Carlin (May 12, 1937 – June 22, 2008)